Chronicles of Nikhil Baliga

Swami Gulagulaananda said: " A person with jaundiced eyes sees everything yellow... figuratively speaking " A lawyer who deals with contracts and divorces observes that every litigant who approaches him complains about breaches of contracts and unhappy marriages. As he goes through years of practice, he perhaps becomes cynical and distrusts contracts and marriages because he has seen so many of them fall apart. However, the reality could be that there are thousands of happy marriages and thousands of people who have been adhering to their contractual obligations. And yet, the lawyer never gets to hear of them in his daily routine - If everything was fine, people wouldn't approach a lawyer to tell him that everything is going hunky-dory... Let's have a look at policemen. Policemen are among those who are often distrusted by the average citizen. Most of the times, an ordinary citizen's opinions of policemen is that they are lazy, corrupt, don't do their jo...

Swami Gulagulaananda said: " Reduce, reuse... I am not so sure about recycling phone numbers " In the good ol' days, people used to create accounts on various platforms using email addresses. But as smart phones started becoming ubiquitous and as 'Mobile First' approaches became the norm with a million apps cropping up every other day, a paradigm shift happened in the sign up process - Mobile numbers were introduced for registering new accounts. Mobile numbers had a few advantages over email addresses - Creating an email addresses is cheap, and people can quickly create multiple email addresses without much hassle. However, people most likely have only one number, and occasionally, some have two. People are less likely to abuse systems like First time user discount  using mobile phones because it is not possible, unlike emails. Verification using OTP is a lot faster than signing up using emails. And so, signing up using mobile phones started becoming the...

Swami Gulagulaananda said: " The higher the moving parts, the higher the chance of failure. Unless you have a process set up " Startled by the shrill sound of my digital alarm, I groped around to hit the snooze button. I thought I had explicitly turned it off, but I was mistaken. Sleep had eluded me for the past few weeks due to the murder case that had kept me awake through several nights at a stretch, and having finally solved it, these few winks of sleep that I had been having were well deserved. As I groggily waved my arms into the darkness trying to reach my clock, I realised by the alternate shimmering of the screen, that it was my phone that had been ringing. Through my heavy eyelids, I tried to concentrate on the name on the screen - It was the Police Commissioner. The sight of that label jolted me upright. I immediately grabbed the phone and answered it. " I'm sorry to wake you up in the middle of the night, Surya, but there has been a development. How...

Swami Gulagulaananda said: "MakeMyTrip  Customer Service Sucks! Period " About ten days ago, I wanted to book a couple of rooms for my parents for a visit to Mangalore. As a regular user of online services like MakeMyTrip  Cleartrip and Go Ibibo, I decided to open three tabs in my browser and check prices across all three portals (Something that we all do). I was, obviously, signed in as I wanted to redeem my wallet points. After seeing that MakeMyTrip was the cheapest, I decided to go ahead with it. I saw that the cost of the room in MakeMyTrip in the booking page was Rs 3162. The screenshot shows the price breakdown. As per this, the room originally costs Rs 4366. They then added their own charges, applied some coupon automatically and also reduced my wallet money. The final bill, inclusive of taxes, came up to Rs 3162. I was happy as any regular customer would be when they see the original price struck off and a new price shown next to it. ...

Swami Gulagulaananda quoted Animal Farm : " All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others " In the month of January, 2015, there was an attack on the offices of the French satirical newspaper, Charlie Hebdo in which 12 people died. This sparked an international outrage with people everywhere saying ' Je suis Charlie ' (I am Charlie) to show solidarity with the families of the dead as well as the rattled survivors. The cowardly attack was executed by fanatics and is definitely condemnable and deplorable. People on Facebook protested by putting the French flag overlay on their profile pictures. I saw my Facebook feed filled with strong words against attacking freedom of expression, some sharing cartoons of how a pen is mightier and expressed outrage in the strongest of terms. A couple of days ago, there was a deadly attack in Somalia in which 500 people died. There has been no outrage, nobody on Facebook putting up Somalian flag overlays and ...

Swami Gulagulaananda said: " It is amazing that a tiny seed can grow into an enormous tree " India lives in its villages - We have heard this many times. And while steps are being taken to ' Make in India ', India is not considered to be a manufacturing hub yet - especially when compared to her giant neighbour, China. Manufacturing is a challenge, and for that matter, entrepreneurship is a challenge. While there are many challenges in starting and building your own enterprise, from hiring and retaining good people, purchasing raw materials and paying for other overheads, the challenges generally have one common denominator - Money. You need money to hire people, money to purchase raw materials, money to pay bills etc. And getting money is the biggest challenge. Once you have a certain amount of money, that money can be put in to generate more money through the business - use a bit of it for operations, a bit of it for purchasing more equipment or hiring more p...

Swami Gulagulaananda said: “ Teaching ethics to a human being is hard. I wonder if machines are easier " There is an old psychology question that we used to ask as kids: There is a railway track on which trains typically pass on, and another track on the side that is not supposed to be used. There is a sign that indicates walking on the main track is dangerous. Walking on the side track is not a problem because trains are not expected to pass on it. A group of ten young boys are playing on the main track while a lone boy is playing on the side track. You notice the train approaching rapidly and are standing beside a lever that can be used to control whether the train continues on the main track, or switch it to the alternate track. Assuming that the side track is not risky for the train and that you cannot shout to shoo the kids off the tracks because they are too far away from you or do anything else - and given only the two following choices, which would you go for? - ...